Tina Ratliff Boley recently qualified to run for the office of Mayor for the City of Bogalusa. The election is set for Nov. 4, and her official ballot number is 77.

Ratliff is the daughter of Dorothy Burns Ratliff and the late Jesse Ratliff. She is the mother of two children, namely Dr. Bryen Brown of Houston and Kevin Brown, currently enrolled fulltime at Grambling State University.

According to her announcement, serving the residents of Bogalusa has been a lifetime experience for Ratliff. Since childhood she has tutored, mentored and helped many of her classmates, co-workers and community to accomplish goals that may have been otherwise unascertainable.

Ratliff is an honor graduate from Bogalusa High School, having participated in several social organizations, the basketball and track teams and several honor societies. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Southern University, serving as the senior class president, sophomore class vice president and freshmen class secretary. She was a member of her college basketball team and graduated from the ROTC program, receiving a commission into the United States Army as a second lieutenant. She was honorably discharged and continues to support our troops through prayers and donations.

Ratliff graduated from the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law School and began to practice law in the city of Bogalusa. Personal ethical conflicts often arose between ministry and the practice of law, and when false allegations of misconduct, which were never proven, began to surface, Ratliff signed a voluntary suspension from the practice of law and devoted herself to her calling as a minister. Ratliff has never been disbarred from the practice of law and has been eligible for reinstatement since April 2003. She was ordained a minister in 2001 and ordained as a pastor in 2010.

During her professional career Ratliff saved one Fortune 500 company over a half million dollars in annual revenues by rebudgeting and redirecting spending. She saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and fines for banking institutions located throughout the United States as part of her employment in the Legal Banking Department of a major law firm. She has worked in an array of legal settings, acquiring experience in contract law, business law, finance, accounting, human resources and other areas of discipline that have equipped her to handle the challenges currently facing the city of Bogalusa. She desires to meet the personnel of the city and thank them, encourage them and bring up their morale. According to her announcement, she will prioritize the work to be done in the city, including roads to be repaired, by extent of damage. She wishes to help improve the educational system by bringing it together.

Ratliff’s home has served as a type of shelter, housing countless transient persons in her home throughout the years, as early as 1996. The Community Outreach program feeds its hungry and homeless members an estimated 100 plates every Saturday, not missing one Saturday since its onset in August 2009 without federal, state or governmental funding. Because Bogalusa does not have a drug and alcohol center, Ratliff said she has personally driven more than 100 residents, male and female, to drug/alcohol rehabilitation establishments outside of the city. Additionally, Ratliff has helped the elderly and disabled to receive free grants to repair their homes. She travels abroad teaching English to persons in countries that cannot afford schools of higher learning.

Ratliff said if she is given the opportunity to help the entire city with the authority the mayor’s title allows, she will do all that is in her knowledge, power and love to rebuild Bogalusa into a city everyone will be proud to live in.